What would be the long-term impact on the internet and society if Google were to completely fail?

Long term? Minimal. All the niches it fills, have alternatives that would just grow to fill them in.

Short term? Catastrophic. Losing GMail and "login with Google" would leave a lot of people with no email, no way to login to other services, and no way to recover their passwords (through email). The loss of Photo backups would also upset many, Drive and Docs would leave a lot of people and businesses without their daily tools. Search would likely be the less affected, with plenty of alternatives already to pick from.

Really, really bad for nonprofits, including schools and health centers, that rely on Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, etc) for providing MS Office-type software for cheap or even free. And these organizations are usually understaffed in terms of IT, so it would take them a long time to get back on their feet.

At this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.

Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.

They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).

A significant amount of trade skill knowledge and examples are tied up in YouTube. Does anyone remember building a deck before YT? You would go to the library, make copies of books or magazines that had a general idea on how to do it, then you would try to do it yourself and things would go wrong constantly.

There’s a lot of this type of stuff that would simply be lost. It’s not unusual to find videos from 15 years ago that are still relevant today.

Why do people here think it would just "disappear" one day? If Google is to fail it would be a years-long process and everyone would have plenty of time to migrate from their services.

I was able to de-google is a matter of months. Btw if you are reading this post please consider moving away from Gmail now.

It'd be very very bad for schools in the US in rural areas. There's no way they'd be able to afford equivalent services to what Google offers them for basically free, ever again. Many children would lose their assignments to Google Drive and others would be sad from losing what's basically a time capsule of their entire life that was stored in there.

Another loss would be Android, and the Google Play Store. So many phones would basically become waste overnight. It'd be absolutely tragic. At least that's the way I see it.

Most less technically literate folks would lose their ability to use their computers overnight. They'd go to Chrome to make a google search to go to their favorite website, and when they see the page showing that Google cannot be found, they'd just assume their computer is broken. Microsoft would be the 'saviour' in this. I'm sure they'd happily push out an update for Windows that resets your default browser to Microsoft Edge (again) and your default search engine to Bing.

Later down the road, whoever buys the old Google domains would likely be able to spread some sick malware and steal a lot of data from people who didn't prepare properly.

That's just what I can immediately think of. I'm sure there's more, or something worse I forgot about. Haha.

There would be some initial shock but we would quickly get over it. Personally, I would be delighted if Google were to do a complete epic fail and close down.

It really depends on how much time people would have to migrate data and swap email accounts. If it's years, we would probably be fine although the financial and data loss would be still be incalculable.

If we didn't have much or any time to migrate.... I don't even want to think about it. If email accounts suddenly got shut down many people would lose banking access, among many other things. It would probably cause a global recession if I had to guess (talking out my ass on this one but I wouldn't be surprised).

As of today it wouldn’t be that hard, alternatives are available and some of them are as good but don’t have the same market share.

Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we're seeing with Twitter right now).

Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.

Right now? Bad. Other Big Tech would swoop in and tech their place and try and take their proprietary market share, but a lot of the open source work would be left to die on the vine, including Firefox. It would be a loss of paid talent in the FOSS world and a massive consolidation of big tech.

Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we're seeing with Twitter right now).

Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.

I don't see a scenario where google or the likes would be allowed to fail. So moot point.

Hypothetically it would open a window for open source services to sneak in.

Microsoft is already ahead with Bing, Ai, and Cortana. Google is an ad mess currently especially with it largest social media content websites in flux.

I’d have to get a new email account for junk.

Minimal. You might see a few arms races to fill the vacuum but the end result of that competition would probably be better than what we have now.